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Political Suicide.

Regular readers will be aware that I have long taken an interest in the local politics of Vera Baird’s old constituency of Redcar and the surrounding areas of Darlington, and Easington.

The once proud mining towns have been reduced to a despicable sea of dependency on benefits – it is too trite to state the cliché invariably trotted out – ‘as a result of Maggie Thatcher’s cuts – true, it was a Conservative government which decided that it could not afford to subsidise the mining industry any longer, no matter how powerful the unions, and there may well be Labour voters out there who imagine that ‘if only’ a Labour government had remained in power, the coal mines would still be subsidised to this day – but I personally doubt it.

A Labour government would have made cuts to the present budget – but if you listen to some in the media, it reads as though all cuts are as a result of ‘Tory maliciousness’.

The political bickering as to who makes, or why, cuts in budgets, serves only to divert the conversation away from those who must endure the cuts.

In the North East, those who bear the brunt of the cuts are the young men who have been educated only to a level that allows them to take manual jobs in heavy industry – jobs which no longer existed by the time they exited that education.

It is an easy jibe to say that they are couch potatoes that need to get off their backside and get a job. There are no jobs for which they are suited. An 18 year old in Darlington today has endured 13 years of education during which he was barely taught to read and write, in the name of allowing his ‘creativity’; barely disciplined, in the name of his human rights; and assaulted on all sides by advertising that extolled the virtues of material acquisition, houses, cars, clothes, women, alcohol – things that would make him happy and could be acquired with money.

Then he is told that he will have none of those things, because we now have a Coalition government which does not care for him, and will bar his route to the things that will make him ‘happy’.

Little wonder that he decides that his life might not be worth continuing with.

I picked up on a short story in the Northern Echo yesterday which appeared to link a rise in suicides amongst young men in the area with the Coalition government now in power for a bare six months.

A SHARP rise in the number of suspected suicides across County Durham could be linked to the recession and the impact of Government cuts.

The story went on to tell of the ‘first rapid response programme being set up’ as a result of a suspected ‘cluster’ of 21 suicides last year….when we still had a Labour government. It told of the £750,000 grant made available to implement ‘prevention measures’.

My first thought was that if these suicides were as a result of ‘Tory cuts’ – then £750,000 wasn’t going to alleviate the problem, and where had this money come from?

The trail led me to County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust – ‘unavailable today by telephone due to unforeseen circumstances’. Intriguing? What unforeseen circumstances can lead to an entire health trust being unavailable for a day? I’ll let you know when I find out! A fruitless telephone call to Durham Samaritan’s service, when it became apparent that the phone line was only working in one direction – the soothingly voiced young women started saying ‘are you finding it difficult to talk’, and ‘we are here to help you, tell me what the problem is in your own time’; until finally I tracked down Charlie Walker on a train to London.

Charlie is an interesting man, an ex-miner, 68 years old, and genuinely interested in his constituents, more interested in them than he is in politics.

Where, I asked him, did this three quarters of a million pounds come from?

‘I don’t know’, was the stark reply. ‘This all started a couple of years ago when I discovered that some of my constituents were taking themselves out to parkland in broad daylight and using dog choke chains to hang themselves, and I couldn’t believe that no one had any idea why they were doing it’.

He kicked up a fuss at his local council meeting – and was exhorted to keep quiet. ‘We don’t want all this getting in the media’ was the general attitude.

Charlie didn’t keep quiet. He went on kicking up a fuss. Eventually the (Labour) government sent a top psychiatrist down from London, Malcolm Rae, to carry out an investigation into the matter. His conclusion was that there was no link between the deaths, other than that these young people were ‘vulnerable’.

One surprising result of all this activity was that the local Mental Health Trust ‘suddenly’ discovered that it might have £750,000 about its person that was intended for this very purpose. Not that they had ever mentioned it before, in fact it is Charlie’s opinion that if he hadn’t made such a fuss, it might well have been moved ‘sideways’ into buying wheelchairs for social services, or some diversity project.

It was especially surprising, because Charlie had already raised the issue of young men returning to the area from Afghanistan and needing mental health counselling – and been told to keep quiet yet again for this was the ‘British Legion’s problem’.

Suddenly the main stream media have taken an interest in the matter, and no one minds talking to the press.

Brian Keys, North-East director of commissioning for mental health with NHS County Durham and Darlington, said the number of suspected suicides in the past seven weeks was “highly unusual”.

A total of £750,000 has been pledged to improve the ability to rapidly identify surges in suicide numbers and implement prevention measures.

The local paper is happy to quote Charlie Walker when he says:

“Some of the reasons are deprivation, debt and marital problems, but we also have to look at unemployment,” he said. “The direction we are heading as a country has contributed to this. I saw it after the mines closed down. We had young miners jumping off cliffs and I fear the same thing happening again.”

I cannot say whether the journalist writing that story also heard Charlie say, as he did to me, that a generation of children have been brought up to believe that they could have it all so long as ‘someone’ provided them with a job, and that the only people stopping them having a job were those nasty ‘Tory’s’ – now back in power. But I can assure you after talking to him, that the last person seeking to make political capital out of these suicides is Councillor Charlie Walker, who has been the driving force behind efforts to discover the real reason for the hopelessness felt by a generation of young men.

He is genuinely concerned for the young in his area, as we all should be –painting this generation as idle good for nothings who merely want to live off the state is not helping them, nor is making political capital out of a ‘sudden rise since June’ in the number of suicides. The real reason is far deeper than that, and if anybody believes that it is as simple as ‘deprivation, debt and marital problems’ – £750,000 is not going to solve it.

Perhaps what is needed from ‘big society’ is that we all take personal responsibility for a least one young person, and try to give them a sense of perspective – deprivation has happened before in communities – the war years come to mind – and people have survived. Life is more than the latest pair of trainers. Those of us who are old can understand that – but the young man of 18 has never known any other world, can imagine no pleasures that don’t require money.

Addendum: It seems that amongst the uses this money is being put to – Durham NHS having now got over their ‘unforeseen circumstances’ and replied to me just as I was about to hit ‘publish’ – is the following initiative:

fast access to talking therapy/counselling support through the development of ‘community responders’ i.e. supported by the local voluntary sector we will train members of local communities to be able to recognise suicide risk, provide a listening ear to those in need and to be able to sign post them on the appropriate services and support. These individuals will work at grass roots level to support those who may not traditionally come forward to access health services. We will pilot this in east Durham in the coming weeks and then consider developing networks of community responders across the county.

Whilst laudable, this still only addresses the problems of those who are ‘seen as’ a suicide risk – rather than the entire generation. However, it is a start, and I would urge anyone who is in the East Durham area to sign up and support it – or just to take their own initiative and take an interest in at least one young person and help them through this period. It really isn’t their fault – but they are paying the price.

{17 comments }

John LevettNovember 25, 2010 at 10:05

Anna – it’s not the fault of the Right or the Left – it’s the fault of the whole political class. The reality is that despite more than 50 years of automating the wealth-generating means of production, the entire political system has failed to manage the transition from the industrial age to the leisure age.

Our society continues to promote the notion of paid work as central to our existence and our worth despite the fact that within the framework of a 40 hour week, 48 weeks a year, there is insufficient paid work available. The unlamented Labour government sought to overcome this by creating a massive, unproductive public sector and effectively raising the school-leaving age to 21 or so (the really cynical bit was eliminating a large chunk of the unemployment benefits bill by making them pay for their redundant 2.2 Media Studies degrees).

We need a major culture shift that recognises the value of the work ethic but places it as the means of self-fulfillment rather than earning a living. What little paid work there is needs to be distributed more evenly and we will need new mechanisms for distributing wealth.

Unless we are going to go on creating new hierarchies of bin inspectors or parking wardens or CCTV operators or H&S operatives or quangocrats or customer service operatives or telesales workers: or unless we decide to carpet our countryside with useless windmills and solar parks just in order to create ‘green’ jobs, we have to accept that our current notion of work is no longer appropriate.

Politicians on all sides need to get to grips with the realities of the 21st century if we are to avoid the growing sense of hopelessness that is afflicting so many of our children. As you say, it is a dark subject and it needs to be faced with something more constructive than the usual knee-jerk pandering to established vested interests.

PericlesNovember 25, 2010 at 18:17

“What little paid work there is needs to be distributed more evenly and we will need new mechanisms for distributing wealth.” — John Levett.

No ; no ; no ! (As Margaret Thatcher might have said.)

Whilst agreeing with much of what John says, I feel he has fallen in to the trap that has swallowed modern society generally : he implies that governments should manage every aspect of the economy. Yet this is where economics has failed mankind everywhere : the intervention of governments — and economists — in the natural order of things.

Governments — at our expense — fiddle with this and that in the misguided belief that they can create economic activity. Although able to do so for short bursts, they are incapable of sustaining it. There is a natural economic cycle ; it varies in length and down-turns are often exacerbated by government action (although rarely will anything done by government alleviate them) ; most of the cycle — its duration, the extent of growth (the boom), the gravity of decline (the slump) — cannot be predicted, what ever economists might tell us, or affected to any material extent by government.

The only real solution is for governments to interfere in the economy as little as possible … especially when it comes to ‘distributing’ things.

ΠΞ

EleanorNovember 24, 2010 at 15:53

Whatever happened to “Don’t buy something unless you can afford to pay for it?”

I had to save to buy my first pair of fashion shoes, and I had to save to buy my much treasured bicycle. This was the point of working, and made the whole business so much more satisfying. I don’t own a Credit Card and I can’t say that I have ever felt suicidal because I still can’t have everything now.

It vanished under the sense of entitlement that is the result of having money handed to them in return for doing nothing – an attitude taught to them by parents in the same position who had no desire to see their offspring where they failed and an education system that wrote them off from the start.

Roue le JourNovember 24, 2010 at 11:25

This is the standard of article one used to buy newspapers for.

What saddens me about this story is that those young men are almost certainly the ones who care passionately about standing on their own two feet and providing for their own. The very ones we can least afford to lose.

Gildas the MonkNovember 24, 2010 at 08:40

This is fantastic journalism

Jeremy PoyntonNovember 24, 2010 at 06:12

Thatcher’s much derided “no such thing as society speech” is in fact, in essence, a speech about personal responsibility. First, we must look after ourselves. Then our family. Then our neighbours. If we will not help ourselves, then no-one else can.

Thatcher’s “Little Society”?

It all starts at home.

Jeremy PoyntonNovember 24, 2010 at 06:08

Twenty years of schooling, and they put you on the day shift…

PericlesNovember 23, 2010 at 23:36

Perhaps H.M. Government could start by acknowledging that anthropogenic global warming (a.g.w.) is a fraud. Margaret Thatcher (as she then was) was delighted to welcome the nascent global-warming scare : it was an excuse to close the mines, which would lead to the defeat of the N.U.M. and the despised Mr. Scargill.

Thirty years on we sit upon the means to power this country’s industry and infrastructure and have the manpower to extract it. Abandoning the a.g.w. scam would free the government to sanction the building of British power stations — to burn British coal — and, once the damage occasioned by the closure of the mines had been fixed, provide the gainful employment this lost generation needs.

Any costs the tax-payer might incur would be compensated for by his not having to fork out £18-billion p.a. for the next forty years on the a.g.w. fraud.

Had a Labour government remained in powrer in 1979 Anna by 1985 we would have been governed from Brusssels. Coal would probably have been subsidised but the subsidies would have been used to buy the machines that put miners out of work elsewhere in the world.

Ed PNovember 23, 2010 at 19:37

As overall state spending will continue to rise over the (expected) term of the Coalition government, why do we all still refer to cuts”? A slightly more accurate label might be redistribution (from Labour’s rewarding of their cronies to, hopefully, a fairer, impartial balance).The MSM should certainly take some blame for the South Wales suicide cluster, as it was “perfect copy” for those inadequate, twisted and malign hacks. The excessive publicity they gave it undoubtedly influenced some teenagers who might otherwise still be alive now.

electro-kevinNovember 23, 2010 at 19:18

And those who don’t commit suicide are so often to be feared.

There are big adjustments ahead. The world will not support a welfarist state.

Politicians of all colour frighten me. Trying to blame this on a government less than six months old is pathetic in the extreme, and as I had to point out to a leftie acquaintance quite recently, it’s not a wicked Tory government. It’s a coalition government.

There are no lengths any of these people will not go to in order to blame anything bad on the other party whilst claiming all the good stuff is down to them. The saddest thing is that we are all stupid enough to fall for it…

Seems there is a bit of tension in Korea at the moment – so that must be because of the Tories as well!

TimacNovember 23, 2010 at 17:38

The NHS are useless when it comes to detecting mental health problems and then dealing with them effectively. If you are feeling suicidal, an NHS doctor will not help you unless you get really pushy with them – not something a depressed person is going to be in the right frame of mind to do well. The Samaritans and Salvation Army on the other hand at least give you someone to talk to – which can help.

Joe PublicNovember 23, 2010 at 17:20

“Feeling Suicidal? Apply for a grant to alleviate the problem. £1,000 per applicant; first 750 applications only.”

Maybe they’re suicidal ‘cos of all the tax they’ve paid; to pay for the Suicide Alleviation Grants?